A recent pair of job listings showed up on Apple’s website this week looking for engineers qualified to implement new public transit-based features for the company’s Maps app, which is now currently a part of iOS and OS X Mavericks. The two jobs at Apple, originally spotted by the folks over at MacRumors, seek a “Maps Public Transit Engineering Manager” and a “Maps C++ Software Engineer – Public Transit.” Both listings were published at the beginning of this week.

Apple is expected to offer some sort of public transit information in a future build of Maps as it builds out the in-house mapping service. Competing navigation apps, including Google Maps have had the feature for several years. As noted in one of the job descriptions:

As a member of the Transit Routing team, you will work on one of the most anticipated features of Apple Maps. You will design and implement functionality that will be used by millions of users worldwide. Being part of a small team, you will have an influence on the future product.

The recent job advertisements come two months after it was announced that Apple acquired Embark, an app and service company that offers public transit information for a number of metropolitan cities. The app was also highlighted by Apple as a stop gap solution for public transit directions after the company moved away from Google Maps. In addition to acquiring Embark, Apple also purchased HopStop this year, an app that provides transit information for over 300 major cities, along with walking, car and bicycle routing.

As many of you may already know, since the launch of Maps with iOS 6, the service has come under fire for not being up to par when compared to the competition. Shortly after launching, users complained of erroneous information, UI bugs and other issues, prompting Apple CEO Tim Cook to issue a personal apology to customers, promising that the service would come more robust over time. To that end, it should be noted that Apple has been constantly improving the app, the results of which can be seen in a more stable and feature-rich version that launched with iOS 7.
We’ll have to see how Apple’s Maps continues to improve over time.